I was hoping to use video thumbnails maker to make screenshots of live music dvds, usually amateur filmed and transferred to DVD from VHS using a standalone dvd recorder.
the only way I can see to do this is to enable "VOB" in "add files with the following extensions." the major problem I have is that the VOBs of many of these standalone recorded dvds have big problems with the timecode. when you import them and try to create thumbnails, a 1 GB VOB may report a duration of 10 seconds or less instead of the real length, which may be 18 minutes for example. so the resulting thumbnails made from the VOB will have a bunch of thumbs but just from the first 10 seconds, which is worthless.
I tried something that almost solves the problem. having the dvd VIDEO_TS folder on the hard drive, I run "DGIndex" and then choose all of the titleset VOBs. then I "save project" which writes a ".d2v" file in the VIDEO_TS folder.
Now, I have avisynth 2.5.8.5 installed, so I make a plain text file into a simple mpeg import script:
mpeg2source("VTS_01_1.d2v")
then I save it changing the .txt extension to .avs (avisynth script.)
now if I right-click the .avs script and choose "open with" -> "video thumbnails maker" then video thumbnails maker opens the script file in a command prompt window. it then scans the full dvd and creates thumbnails of the full dvd!
the big problem is that if I run VTM and try to enable ".avs" in "add files with the following extensions" it is not there. I need to be able to add the ".avs" file in order to "choose shots manually."
can you somehow integrate "DGIndex" into VTM? so that if you want to create thumbnails from a dvd, it first scans the dvd with DGIndex and saves the .d2v file, makes a quick avisynth script to import into VTM, which makes it possible to create thumbnails from an entire dvd quickly and easily.
or at the very least, can you enable adding .avs scripts created using the above steps? so it is possible to "choose shots manually" since most amateur filmed concert video has many bad frames, making automatic screenshots not useful.
problem with DVDs FIXED (100%)
well I guess you are not interested. regardless, I have figured out 100% how to do this now. after you index the dvd as above, you "wrap" the .avs script using AVFS and voila you have a mounted ".avi" that you can open in VTM and manually choose thumbs from the entire dvd, with the correct duration.
you should really take the .VOB option out of this program and tell people it doesn't work for any DVDs, until you are willing to make sure it indexes the VOB or entire disc for proper importation as I have have explained here.
you should really take the .VOB option out of this program and tell people it doesn't work for any DVDs, until you are willing to make sure it indexes the VOB or entire disc for proper importation as I have have explained here.
How did you manage to do that? I have created d2v file and have installed avisynth, but it did not help VTM to process avs file (I used "Open with..." to send it to VTM).lazerdisk wrote: ....
now if I right-click the .avs script and choose "open with" -> "video thumbnails maker" then video thumbnails maker opens the script file in a command prompt window. it then scans the full dvd and creates thumbnails of the full dvd!
You AVFS idea is great, but currently it looks like I will add *.avs extension to the list of allowed extensions in VTM, if I will understand how did manage to use avs file.